Recently I’ve been on a number of consultation calls with small business owners - from an independent pharmacy to a legal practice to a tax practice to an urgent care clinic - asking me about how to market their business. The conversations are pretty much the same, so I decided to write a blog post outlining how I think of marketing.
A quick disclaimer before we get into it, the following assumes you have a business that is functioning and you have some customers. You're at the point where you want to scale up and get more customers but don’t know how exactly to do that.
Understand the Problem, Don’t Jump to Solutions
The first thing I always do when talking to entrepreneurs is to frame this as a problem that they’re trying to solve. Too often people coming to me and tell me I spent thousands on Facebook ads and I only got 2 customers or I spent money on influencers but didn’t get any sales. When I’m having these conversations with people it becomes clear that they aren’t thinking about the problem at a deep level. Someone told them that Facebook ads worked for them so they assumed it’ll also work for me.
We can’t afford to make assumptions here. Marketing spend is supposed to be an investment. The expectation is if we put in 1 dollar into marketing, we’ll get more than a dollar back.
So the first step is to drop the preconceived notions you may have about what you think you should be doing and focus on the root cause of the problem. In operations we’d use the 5 whys method to get to the actual root cause of the problem. Basically you keep asking why until you can’t ask it anymore.
We don’t have as many customers as we’d like?
Why?
Because we’re not reaching new customers.
Why?
Because we don’t have a customer acquisition strategy.
Why?
Because we don’t know how to make a customer acquisition/marketing strategy.
We can go deeper but this is good enough to actually solve the problem properly. At this point we know that we need a customer acquisition plan aka a marketing plan.
There’s a lot of material available for how to create a marketing plan. Most books I’ve read vary in the actual tactics they use but the overall principles are the same. In this article we’re going to cover the principles.
Principle 1: Find Out Where Your Ideal Customer Hangs Out
I was talking to an operator of an independent pharmacy and right off the bat he was asking me about digital marketing. Should we run Facebook ads? Should we be on Instagram and tiktok?
I said hold up, let’s talk about your customers. Who are your customers?
He said they’re mainly people ages 60+, many of them live in nursing homes in the area.
If you’re into marketing this line of thinking may seem absurd to you. Why would you spend money on ads on a platform where your ideal customer is not even on?
Principle 2: Earn Goodwill With Your Ideal Customers
Once you know where your ideal customer hands out, go to those places - whether virtually or physically - and add to the conversation. Answer questions when you can, try to be helpful and don’t expect anything in return. Your goal right now is to start conversations with your ideal customers. You want to learn what problems they’re having and how you can help them.
Principle 3: Solve Problems Until People Ask to Pay To Work With You
The problem some people make if they get through principle 1 and then principle 2 is that they ask way too early. It’s like meeting someone and then later that day asking them to marry you. You have to earn enough trust and goodwill before people are willing to do business with you - especially if they aren’t problem aware.
So what do you do when you meet your ideal customers?
Solve their problems for free. There’s no better way to build trust and earn goodwill than solving someone’s problems without asking for anything in return. These first few people may not end up being your customers, but if you crush it for them, it will start creating demand for your services because they will tell other people. Once you have demand, you’re in business.